The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years - Hardcover

Shah, Sonia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374230013 ISBN 13: 9780374230012

Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books, 2010

Synopsis

In recent years, malaria has emerged as a cause célèbre for voguish philanthropists. Bill Gates, Bono, and Laura Bush are only a few of the personalities who have lent their names—and opened their pocketbooks—in hopes of curing the disease. Still, in a time when every emergent disease inspires waves of panic, why aren’t we doing more to eradicate one of our oldest foes? And how does a parasitic disease that we’ve known how to prevent for more than a century still infect 500 million people every year, killing nearly 1 million of them?

In The Fever, the journalist Sonia Shah sets out to answer these questions, delivering a timely, inquisitive chronicle of the illness and its influence on human lives. Through the centuries, she finds, we’ve invested our hopes in a panoply of drugs and technologies, and invariably those hopes have been dashed. From the settling of the New World to the construction of the Panama Canal, through wars and the advances of the Industrial Revolution, Shah tracks malaria’s jagged ascent and the tragedies in its wake, revealing a parasite every bit as persistent as the insects that carry it. With distinguished prose and original reporting from Panama, Malawi, Cameroon, India, and elsewhere, The Fever captures the curiously fascinating, devastating history of this long-standing thorn in the side of humanity.

About this title

About the Author

Sonia Shah is a science journalist and author of the prize-winning The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World's Poorest Patients, named one of the best consumer health books of 2006 by Library Journal, and Crude: the Story of Oil. A former writing fellow of The Nation Institute and the Puffin Foundation, her writing has appeared in The Lancet, The Nation, New Scientist and elsewhere.

Reviews

This fascinating, mordant pop-sci account tells us why malaria is one of the world™s greatest scourges, killing a million people every year and debilitating another 300 million, and why we have remained complacent about it. Journalist Shah (The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs in the World™s Poorest Patients) shows how the Plasmodium parasite, entering through a mosquito™s bite and feasting on human red blood cells, has altered human history by destroying armies, undermining empires, and driving changes in our very genome. We™ve learned to fight back with antimalarial drugs and insecticides, but malaria™s adaptability and its buzzing vector, Shah notes, give it the upper hand. Shah provides an intricate and lucid rundown of the biology and ecology of malaria, but her most original insights concern the ways in which human society accommodates and abets the parasite. (The impoverished denizens of Africa™s malaria belt, she observes, would sometimes rather use the pesticide-laced bed nets sent by Western aid groups to catch fish.) Shah™s is an absorbing account of human ingenuity and progress, and of their heartbreaking limitations. 16 pages of b&w illus.
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Investigative journalist Shah maintains her signature pattern (Crude, 2004; The Body Hunters, 2006) here, exposing both the seemly and not-so-seemly aspects of the subject under review. As Shah demonstrates, when it comes to taming, never mind eradicating, malaria, the disease is cannily able to keep the ball in humankind's court. Notwithstanding, people in tropical climes who live with its ubiquitous presence have over time come to uneasy terms with the fever. That is not to say they would not benefit from a cure. Indeed, their need is most critical. It's just that when Western nontropical humans are exposed to malaria, they suffer its worst effects, then tackle the problem in largely ineffectual ways. And it is not for want of money (think Bill and Melinda Gates). But Shah takes no prisoners, blasting everyone, including the World Health Organization. Even Harvard's state-of-the art Malaria Initiative takes it on the chin for eschewing unglamorous but effectual grunt work in favor of “lavishly funded . . . economy building technology.” Malaria may rule humankind, but Shah rules the in-depth investigative report. --Donna Chavez

Edition details

• Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374230013
• ISBN 13: 9780374230012
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320